Petrarch Page 4
Preoccupation with physical death is perhaps the preeminent subject matter of the poems in this period (1347-1348), far outstripping others in any quantitative sense. A transition period in the collection, its importance for the poet is reflected in the fact that he commemorates the twentieth anniversary of his loving Laura (1347) twice, in poems 212 and 221 (see table 2). Although Part II (poems “on the death of Laura”) consists of one hundred and three poems, the two hundred and sixty-three “on the life of Laura” fall into the shadow of death more often than not. It is interesting, in fact, how Part II seems to contain so many poems that confirm life, quite as many erotic poems as Part I, and three canzoni that sing Laura’s praises as beautifully as anywhere, for example, that on falling in love with love again, poem 270. Grief has its other side; loss of Laura brings a deepening of devotion and a growing appreciation of friendship, less self-mystification, and a clearer sense of boundaries. The satire after Laura dies seems less vitriolic and aims at folk humor or old men’s pleasures. Even in the final poems, which Petrarch rearranged to show a more spiritual progression (so he said), his wit remains irrepressible, his consciousness of the umano at its peak. Like Cyrano de Bergerac when he is dying, Petrarch’s persona knows when he finally has the ear of the world and gains his second wind, saving some of his panache for the end, for those poems that will vindicate him. Style supplies its own history in the Canzoniere, reaching deep into the past in the first part of the work, becoming increasingly fertile and experimental in the central portion, and turning more toward a common humanity at the end. Even as he pictures Laura being welcomed as the new queen of heaven in poem 346, his vision has its lowly components, its ties to the everyday. Poems 359 and 360 find him humbled, childlike; in poem 361 he resigns himself to the fact that he cannot buy more life in this world, although love still resonates in his mind if not his loins; and in poem 363, by deferring the final reckoning to God, this solitary, elemental man accepts the immanence of his dying.
Petrarch’s heaven in these late sonnets is lowercase, the celestial music soft-pedaled by a Socratic irony that permits the dying man his commonality, his all too physical mock-up of the afterlife. In them he falls back on a simple faith unsupported by elaborate metaphysical systems. Only the stunning apologia of the closing canzone, “Vergine bella” (poem 366) finally brings vision back from errant wish-fulfillment to the biblical model of Revelation. And yet while Laura, human love, beauty, and all the hubris and flare of the struggling poet are subsumed in Revelation’s enduring truth in this concluding hymn, Petrarch’s tinkering with its symbolism reveals a certain intransigence. To the very end he shapes form and meaning to reveal in the poem’s numerology an inherent weakness in his argument, reflecting in the eighth stanza the face of the proud dissenter. Mary’s integrating force defeats presumption, however, holding him at bay—at the tip of her foot—and the poem ends with reverence and compliance.
With dismissive gestures, Petrarch seems to cast off Laura in the final poems of the Canzoniere, as if he had exhausted her usefulness. Of the three aspects of madonna, only the motherly counselor remains. Laura as a source of pleasure has faded to a brief sight in 350.13 and, as a threat of death (Medusa), to a cause for repentance in the re-cantatory closing poem, number 366. These disparagements of her importance are puzzling, since it is only natural to anticipate that the Laura he adored and praised from the start would emerge from the whole body of poems as more than a discredited sign of the poet’s folly and weakness. The question arises, what reason did Petrarch have for discounting her other than the conventional one of spurning the “world” and belatedly turning to matters of the spirit?
In the congedo of the canzone numbered 23, he suggested what it was about his vernacular poetry that set him apart from the Greek and Latin epic poets he tried to emulate in Africa, his unfinished Latin poem:
Canzone, never was I that golden cloud
that once descended in a precious rain
so as to quench in part Jove’s burning flame;
but surely I was flame lit by Love’s glance,
I was the bird that rises highest through the air
raising the one whom in my words I honor;
and no strange shape could ever make me leave
the first laurel, for still its lovely shade
clears every lesser pleasure from my heart. (161-169)
The flame within, lit by love of Laura and kept burning until late in the work, was his desire to convey the poetry of praise to the “highest” realm; but no heroes were to be born out of it as Perseus was from Jove’s “gold cloud” in the myth of Danaë. The canzone itself, for all the high purpose of its closing lines, is cut off in the freeze-frame of Actaeon’s flight in its last metamorphosis (Diana’s punishment for his having glimpsed her naked), as inconclusive as the Canzoniere will be upon reaching its final turning toward self-justification in poem 360. A microcosm within the macrocosm that is the finished work of 366 poems (a plot within a plot), poem 23 ends with a cri de coeur, but a vain one. Like the silent scream of Ovid’s Actaeon (“I am Actaeon, I am he!”) as he fled his own hounds in the form of a stag, Petrarch’s attempts to be heard will be stifled by the very medium in which he writes. His futile cry will finally be articulated in 360.149 (“Ben me la die’, ma tosto la ritolse” [He gave me her but quickly took her back!]), as if Petrarch meant to lament that in undertaking to praise his fierce goddess in bold, concise language he has come up against some other truth, has failed to communicate her meaning to a ravenous and uncomprehending world, has even in some way murdered his own creation through his love of her.
The Canzoniere demonstrates in particular how sentimental or physical love of woman may seize the imagination and cause the poet’s desire to speak honestly, of human and divine beauty, to go astray, becoming disingenuous in spite of itself; and how, when that same love skirts too close to sacrilege or blasphemy (an underlying theme of poem 23) his efforts to clarify his meanings lead to obfuscation and irrelevance. In general it shows how language has been diluted by the derivative and contaminated by the figurative to the point where its terminology no longer can say what love poets would have it say without risking misinterpretation or vulgarity—and what is worse, banality. Boccaccio testified to the more ribald truths in his “Author’s Conclusion” to the Decameron (p. 685), defending the “liberties” he took with his stories:
And if they do contain a few expressions or little words here and there that are somewhat freer than a prude might find proper (ladies of the type who weigh words more than deeds and who strive more to seem good than to be so), let me say that it is no more improper for me to have written these words than for men and women at large to fill their everyday speech with such words as ‘hole,’ ‘peg,’ ‘mortar,’ ‘pestle,’ ‘wiener,’ and ‘fat sausage,’ and other similar expressions.
Boccaccio excuses himself on the grounds that “even more outrageous stories are to be found in the Church’s annals than in my own writings,” referring first to the inevitable pitfalls in vernacular language, rooted as it often is in the carnal, and perhaps second to Latin monastic texts of the late Middle Ages interwoven with sexual material that caressed God’s blessings too sensuously, particularly in writings about the Holy Family. However, double entendre and widespread signaling of concupiscence were only some of the dangers to be encountered in literature. The imprecision of grammar and ambiguous syntax were also pitfalls. Petrarch uses and abuses these and other faults of speech in a number of ways in the first part of the Canzoniere, inflating his metaphors, for example, in poems 176-178 and 189; demonstrating vacuousness and redundancy in poems 74,170,184, 205, 217, and 219; and exploiting the sexual connotations of words all through the collection. The long sonnet cycles of the middle part of the work (following poem 150 and ending with 263) often play with language to the point of parody, using its structures to show how it may strain under too great a weight or describe the confused mental state of the protagonist or reveal t
he innate propensity of words to transform themselves when met within a new context.
Such threats to signification, as Gellrich has shown, had long been medieval preoccupations, to be remedied by the search for a pure, original tongue through which the holy subject might interact with earthly texts while yet remaining virginal. For Hugh of St. Victor, for example, seeking the way back to the primal tongue entailed coming “through the word to a concept, through a concept to a thing, through the thing to its idea, and through its idea [arriving] at truth” (Gellrich, p. 101). It could be said that Petrarch began the Canzoniere with one such noble goal in mind: the desperate love of the poet would be put to the task of finding the one and only meaning of the word. But a penchant for exploring etymology and the underpinnings of speech opened up intriguing complexities early in the work, beginning with the evocation of the name LAURETA in poem 5:
When I summon my sighs to call for you,
with that name Love inscribed upon my heart,
in LAUdable the sound at the beginning
of the sweet accents of that word come forth.
Your REgal state which I encounter next
doubles my strength for the high enterprise,
but “TAcitly,” the end cries, “for her honor
needs better shoulders for support than yours.”
And so, to LAUd and to REvere the word
itself instructs whenever someone calls you,
O lady worthy of all praise and honor,
unless, perhaps, Apollo be offended
that morTAl tongue be so presumptuous
to speak of his eternally green boughs.
By dividing the name into the three syllables LAU, RE, and TA, the poem points to the worthy but chancy goal of completing the sentence (copulatio of subject and object) without having compromised its high subject matter. Poem 5 outlines a doubly difficult task. In order to bridge the contrarities of language with a “smoothly apportioned construction,” as Hugh of St. Victor had called the superstructure of Scripture, Petrarch had first to reconcile fundamental opposites with occult skills. Following St. Augustine, Hugh had written in his Didascalicon of Scripture’s aedificium:
The foundation is in the earth, and it does not always have smoothly fitted stones. The superstructure rises above the earth, and it demands a smoothly apportioned construction. Even so the Divine Page, in its literal sense, contains many things which seem both to be opposed to each other and, sometimes, to impart something that smacks of the absurd or the impossible. But the spiritual meaning admits no opposition; in it, many things can be different from one another, but none can be opposed. (Quoted in Gellrich, p. 133)
Presuming that Petrarch set out to highlight the spiritual meaning of sacred language and became sidetracked by its contrarities and “things that smack of the absurd”—the peculiar departures from logic buried in the vocabulary he was using, for example—it is possible to read a subtext into the Canzoniere that explains many of its disjunctions as picaresque or intuitive researches into verbal ground a fourteenth-century poet could only guess at from the vernacular language he had to work with. In the course of the work, “stones” which the poet selects to form his superstructure seem to become progressively more riddled with doubt about the wider implications of terms for Laura’s cultured social virtues (e.g., chastity, honor, humility, honesty, valor, beauty, and grace), more covered over with verbal briars of a rough, barbaric sort (his prickles, burrs, and arid outgrowths, images that continually recall the wasteland), with the result that they prove at first testing in Part I of the work not to support belief. The reader is struck again and again with what appears to be skepticism on the part of the poet, what De-Sanctis referred to as a shrinking back from the sublime. The search for a convincing representation of virtue is made into allegory for the failure of reason to find definition, to maintain a brave and steady light in the midst of ghostly appearances. The last sonnet in Part I, poem 263, therefore ends quixotically. The poem is top-heavy, its triumph seeming hollow as a sequel to what has come before. This may be why in the next canzone, “ I’ vo pensando” (I go on thinking), he is as sunk in his moral dilemma as ever.
Because of the inherent ambivalence of the language Petrarch chooses to use at many points in the Canzoniere, no doubt partly in response to everyday usage he could not resist recording, his critical sense takes over from the romantic early in the work. The final lines of poem 16, a sonnet cherished over the centuries for its pathos and composed for the most part of humble physical details, seem deliberately to trivialize Platonic ideality (even risking blasphemy, as some have noted), as if to bring attention to the folklore built up around it. The pilgrim, the image of Christ, the woman, and the desiring poet make of their elements a strange mix—one rough communal cloth. What Petrarch seems to be saying in poem 16 is, look at the literal earthiness from which this concept of vera forma springs. Inquiry leads him, as it did Socrates and Dante, into the fundaments of speech. From poem 5 onward, an honorable end is frequently called upon to justify the means the poet employs to redeem the whole; 5.7-8, 23.31,140.14, and 207.65 are statements of this principle. But sometimes in pursuit of a virtuous human love, honor proves to be difficult to recall in the face of a complex reality. Eventually the poet languishes, his chosen medium of love poetry having reached a blind alley, as in poem 224. Because he is deprived by unrequited love of the power to bring his unique vision into focus, to decisively communicate, he falls into the fragmentary, the base, the infinitely reductive. Coherence is sacrificed late in Part I and not restored until he purges himself of his youthful pretensions of grandeur in poems 323 and 332.
The Canzoniere’s progressions suggest that Petrarch diverged from the grand tradition of literature, from heroics and architectonics, partly in order to create an ingenious thematic sourcebook of poetic language, one that developed into completeness—from grandiose assumptions to questioning to cynicism to acceptance of limitations—almost in spite of itself. Later, when he began arranging poems into finished collections, he came to regard his sonnets as nugellae, figuratively “trifles” but etymologically the buried seeds he hoped would germinate in other poets, even if the epic style of Homer, Virgil, and Dante proved to be beyond him. His poems offer little clues that lead out of the labyrinth of reasoning, each connected to the other in a contextual sense through its innate particularities, each offering its potential for flowering into beauty or for illuminating the dangers encountered in the writing process. In his honest appraisals of poetry’s power and shortcomings, Petrarch shows how an enduring model of expression might emerge.
Mazzotta (p. 77) writes that for Petrarch, “language betrays desire, both in the sense that it reveals desire, is its spy, and because language bears an essential otherness to the desire that generates it.” However, such treachery can be intentional or unintentional; in Petrarch’s verse in particular, inadvertent betrayals often result from diverse readings of terms. What is this mal of his anyway? (The term appears over sixty times in the Canzoniere.) Perhaps the principal red herring in love poetry, it can be translated as “harm,” “pain,” “weakness,” “illness,” or “evil.” Reducing its sense in every case to concupiscence (the ecclesiastical meaning to which many commentators refer) confuses the issue, never more so than in reading the Canzoniere, where sex often seems to be the last thing on his mind. Pinpointing the true and only meaning of mal equates with finding the ultimate meaning of Laura, a sense that shades into or emerges from the character of the individual poem, from where it stands in the text, and from what it says about where it stands. One ultimately weighs the burden of evidence to reach definition.
Petrarch’s modus operandi always was to send the mind back to the genesis of language in nature and in God—practically speaking back to the poems preceding, with their categories carefully established and metaphorical structures precise and uncompromising. The first ten sonnets, for example, may have been intended to be paradigmatic, to correspond with medieval
number symbolism. Poem I, an epilogue or exergue, speaks summarily from outside the work; poem 2 begins his history as set into motion by poem I; poem 3 links the soul in time with the demiurge Love; poem 4 establishes a foundation in time and place; poem 5 envisions the beloved in a worldly setting; poem 6 succumbs to her in rapture; poem 7 states his mortal goal as a poet; poem 8 shows the spiritual plight of one devout man caught in the world’s “last days”; poem 9 prophesies the root cause for his falling short in artistic terms; and poem 10, with its note of preparation for a second coming, enlists all the poem’s elements in the service of the friends of Christ. When he wanders off the well-traveled path, as he does in his long sonnet series (see table 1, p. xii), it is to escape an impasse. What seems conflicted in his thought processes at first, too absolutist or self-defeating in early poems such as 22, 30, 66, and 80 (sestinas which seek to fix, in their six recurring rhymes, six shades of meaning), begins to loosen and become more supple in these stylistic excursions. What distinguishes a sonnet series such as poems 215-236, for example, is the way Petrarch makes a penance of experimentation in a group of twenty-two poems as rich with earthy vocabulary as any in the work. Again, in poems 150-205 and 333-358, it is possible to recognize the free-thinker at work, pushing the limits of doctrine. Each sonnet in these series has its own purpose, yet in their variety they reveal the ways in which language can be precise or made vague and subjective, both enriched and debased by terms meant to serve temporal aims.